Homeschool November 30

In order to break up the monotony of our schoolwork I decided to do everything hands-on tonight. It was a lot of fun. We made no cook play dough first off, from a recipe that I found on another blog. Everyone voted for it to be yellow. It was a TOTALLY easy recipe and I think we will make some more at some point during next week so we can play with the different colors.

This was the first time that everyone actually helped me to do something in the kitchen. I was very impressed that each of them waited their turn. I was also glad that the recipe was easy to divide by 4 so everyone could add all of the ingredients. Everyone can definitely count by 4 now. LOL

I added the boiling water to the dry ingredients and everyone took a turn to knead the dough. When it wasn't so sticky anymore I split it out into 4 pieces and let everyone have a piece to knead.

I love the fact that it is so quick that once you knead it and it isn't sticky you can play with it. It was much softer and nicer than the stuff you buy in the stores.

They let me play with them for a little bit and I made a snowman (the one on the right. LOL). Niya kept stealing my pieces as I made them so I wasn't sure if I'd ever get it done lol. She thought it was hilarious to hear me whine and ask for it back. Zi tried to copy mine and he did really good making his body....but a jealous 2 year old smashed it :-( and hurt his feelings. He tried hard to recover but it kept falling and then he smashed it to keep it from falling over. I encouraged him and told him he was doing great so he went ahead and added the eyes and arms to it. I named mine frosty the doughman. We decided that his could be doughman too and they were buddies. I so enjoy playing with my babies.
I had some airtight buckets that I had gotten from Dollar Tree and so I stored it in there. I have 5 more of these little buckets so we must make some more colors. Mine will only be able to play with one color at a time though because they tend to make a blended mess. But they had fun with their yellow which actually began to resemble yellow cookie dough rather than the brilliant yellow I imagined. Next time I plan to do orange and add some pumpkin spice to make it scented. I am sure I will have to stop the baby from eating it. Shucks, I may have to stop Zi and Niya from eating it. LOL

Amarion got to play I Spy with his sight words. Another activity I saw on a different blog that I follow. I wrote several of his sight words on a piece of cardstock and then I let him fill a Ziploc bag with rice. I tried taping it over the top but I only have masking tape, and while it works great for the floor activities we do - it's sticking power was rather lacking.

He did do really good though finding his words and writing them down. He had not found all of them so I let him continue with his activity after dinner. Then I had to change the rules because he saw that he could lift up the bag so he just started moving the bag and writing the words like that. Well I solved that problem - I cut out each word and put them in the bag and added more rice. Now he has to work to not only find the words but then turn them over - which is not an easy feat in a bag or rice.

After dinner Zion finally got to play his drums. They are not nearly as loud with his door closed. Thank you Jesus!!! So he got 15 minutes of that while Niya and I worked on numbers at the table. I didn't get pictures but I bought some silicone baking cups and put paper numbers in the bottoms. We say what the numbers are and she counts that many things (depends  on what I pulled out - this time it was santa, penguin, and snowman pencil toppers)
Then we moved to the floor. While they napped I redid our floor numbers and this time I went all the way to ten. We play a game where I call out a number and they hop to it. I am amazed at the simple games I make and my kids want to play over and over and over and over.......I love the repetition and I guess they don't realize they are learning and think they are just playing with mommy (well, we are playing. LOL)

Every now and then I would tell them to count the dots by each number. Zi is 4 and is better at this than Niya but she is coming along. Since we have been counting so much lately she no longer skips 3.
I am also working with them on recognizing different shapes so while they were napping I made another activity where I took shapes from a game we made at Lowe's Kid workshop and traced them onto a piece of cardstock. Then I gave them the shapes and they matched them up. They are super fast at this so they were done within a couple of minutes.

And they wanted to do it over and over again as well. I think I am going to pull some random toys from the toy boxes next time and let them figure those out for a bigger challenge.
My guys are the BEST!!